A Research for the Formation of Basic Concepts in Physics

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In the fiscal 1993 year, we made an inquiry for our freshmen what the actual condition of the physics classes had been in their upper secondary school days. Getting into college, fewer students seemed to look back themselves on the past with satisfaction of mastering dynamics. Althogh each of the themes treated in the school, e.g., "balance of power", motion of object", and "the law of motion", meant the pursuit of truth, the actual situation turned out to be far from being ideal. Fundamentally, devising various methods of education arouses a great interst of the student. We had reported in 1994 that conceptual understanding requires in advance somewhat qualitative consideration, which enables the students to grasp the whole concept in minute detail after all. Based on this knowledge, we prepared a couple of new classes to bring out the best ability to understand the physics concept - varying momentum. Account was also taken of all preconceptions held by the students at the very beginn … More ing of each lesson. The experiment for 10th grade students made it clear that a chain of experience of individual consideration about basic concepts is indispensable in the present field of education. That is to say, these high school students could only arrive at the right concept finally through the whole scientific program including the observation of much interesting topics on, i.e., the acceleration of gravity or weight, inelastic collision phenomena, the second law of motion, and so on, This educational program was just the process that appeals to the students to realize a strong relationship between momentum and force. As they had not learned momentum at this stage of the course yet, we called not a product but a simple set of mass and velocity a momentum for the time being. We investigated what motivates the students to analyze this relationship themselves in detail. On the other hand, we made up the so-called virtual classroom information system for our program in 1995. Thanks to the proper arrangement of multi-media system, i.e., the Internet network, the student can easily ask teacher's advice immediately as he sit in the classroom or even in his living room. The system will be used to promote the pursuit of truth for students and to evaluate thier creativity for our ends of research. A creativity examination of the standard form was carried out at our model school, too. One of the data was analyzed and reported as part of our educational program. Less